Apple Users Wrestle With iCloud Outage

Apple's iCloud experienced an outage on Tuesday that has impacted a variety of services. Users on the blogosphere are reporting a variety of issues with signing onto the system, accessing email, accessing iTunes, and a variety of other functions.

The company has acknowledged issues with its Apple ID sign-on, GameCenter, the iTunes store and account sign-in. But as of noon Eastern time, the company's system status page reports that most of these services have been restored. Users attempting to access the services had mostly experienced failures in authentication.

The status page acknowledges that some users have been affected, but does not provide any specific totals.

Although the Apple outage does not seem to impact business-critical applications, with the possible exception of email, cloud outages in general can cause a variety of customer issues, resulting in the need for immediate action by channel partners.

"There are some services for which I have workarounds, and other services for which I don't have workarounds," said Jim McCool, director of operations at CWPS, a Chantilly, Va.-based channel partner. "When things like that happen, we typically get a lot of calls. In fact, they pretty much call us for everything. But a lot of times, we are the ones who end up calling the customers because we do a lot of proactive monitoring of the systems. So sometimes we are aware of the outage before they are."

Apple's iCloud has seen a number of service interruptions in recent weeks. A spokesperson for the company could not be reached for comment.

Doron Kempel says selling hyper-convergence can be challenging for solution providers, but success will come from taking business from competitors that are unprepared or hesitant to embrace the technology.